The Australia Games, er i mean commonwealth games!
Trip Start
Oct 04, 2004
1
93
102
Trip End
Ongoing
Melbourne,
Australia
Monday, March 27, 2006
The atmosphere and vibe has been amazing running up to the Games, with everything being painted and cleaned to make the city look its best to the billions of people watching via the world's media. It has made living here all that bit better. By the time the Opening Ceremony finally come around Melbournians were raring to go!
None of us (apart from Dan and Holly) were to keen on paying $250 for an opening ceremony ticket, so we made our way to the banks of the Yarra River to watch it on the many huge TV screens they had erected for the purpose. If you watched it on TV, you would have seen about a million other people thought this would be a good idea to
01. down by the river for the opening ceremony
! That said we still got a great view of the "fish" and the spectacular fireworks they ended the show with. TV crews filmed from helicopters above and I can honestly say I have never seen Melbourne look so good. (See photos above).Originally, Melbourne thought tickets would be so in demand they held a ticket ballot, meaning you apply for what you want, and if you were lucky enough to be 'drawn out of the hat' you could then pay for the tickets. Well the council got it a bit wrong, as there really wasn't much interest in tickets until about a month beforehand. This means Dan was lucky/unlucky enough to get all the sports he applied for, those being:
Opening ceremony
Closing ceremony
Athletics finals
Swimming finals
Hockey
I say unlucky because those were the most expensive events so it cost him an absolute fortune
02. some of the fish used in the ceremony
! Luckily for me, I got to go to the Swimming and Athletics, so I was happy, but more about that in a minute.Beforehand, and to an event we didn't even apply for, was the Rugby 7's. We had been planning to go from day 1, but left it to the last minute to get the tickets! Eventually 6 of us got tickets, and they were so cheap ($15 - About 6 Pounds!) Not bad when you consider you see 15 games! Sadly Dan and me had tickets for the Comedian Roy Chubby Brown (which was crap by the way), so we had to leave before the game we beat Australia in, but how satisfying was it! That shut them up for a while!
Getting the bug for Rugby 7's, and the fact we were actually quite good at it, we spent all next day searching the internet for tickets to the finals, which, with 30mins to spare we managed to get! The night was brilliant. we saw about 12 games including our win over Fiji and sadly our loss to NZ in the finals! Watching the Tongan team teach the Kenyan team their Haka was particularly good! The highlight of the night had to be Australia not winning a medal! Something that happened very rarely at the games, as you will all know!
The next event we (me and Tanielle) went to was the Swimming
03. Charlotte again
. We were tempted to sell the tickets being it was the most popular event of the Games, but the Commonwealth Games had a deal with ebay, so no tickets could be sold over face value! We arrived 5 minutes late, and from the roar of the crowd, realised we missed Australia's first Gold medal of the evening! Luckily, England and Scotland managed to win a couple of gold's each throughout the night, so I didn't have to listen to the Australian National Anthem 12 times - although I still heard it 8! The atmosphere was amazing - when Australia was winning - but we thought $150 (60 pounds) was a bit much for an hour and a half of swimming!That's what made the Athletics that much better. At only half the price of the Swimming we had front row seats! I had a bit of a mission finding someone to go with, with 3 people dropping out last minute, but with 30 minutes to spare I got a phone call from a girl wanting to come. Plenty of Mexican waves were started and the atmosphere was just electric. Its not often you get to sit in a stadium as big as the MCG with 83,000 other people! It definitely went down as the best sporting night of my life - it was just a shame those Aussies had to disqualify our Ladies 4x400 women's running team! Even the Aussies in the stadium were booing when that got read out over the tannoy!
As with the opening, we weren't really up for paying to see the closing ceremony so a few of us made our way to Federation Square to watch it on big screen, then after made our way down to the Yarra for the final time to watch the fireworks. The 2 weeks had gone so quickly, but it was a brilliant time to be here - even if the Aussies did win all the medals!
Next update... Hong Kong... watch this space!
